Research On The Factors Influencing Inter-firm Relationship Quality Within Industrial Clusters

With the acceleration of the global economic integration, the market environment has becoming more and more complicated. More and more enterprises realize that if they want to acquire and remain sustain competitive advantages in the complex market environment,they must establish sound cooperative relations with other enterprises in the value chain and related organizations to realize resource sharing and advantageous complementarities.So, a large number of related enterprises in the value chain and supporting agencies such as government, industry association, management consulting institutions gathered in definite region, formed industrial cluster which is an unique form of spatial organization. With huge competitive advantage, industrial cluster has become important mode to promote regional economic development even the national economic development.Since the reform and open policy, industrial clusters, as the important force to promote regional economic development, began to emerge in China, Among them the industrial clusters in Guangdong Province, Zhejiang Province and Jiangsu Province are the most representative. In the industrial cluster, there is a clear division among firms,they cooperate to increase the effect of economy of scale and scope that come from geographical agglomeration.However,China’s industrial clusters development level is low overall, firms within industrial clusters don’t have enough understanding to enterprise cooperation, more competition and less cooperation, and collaboration is also more limited to short-term behavior. This phenomenon seriously hindered to improve the competitiveness of enterprises in the cluster,the cluster is unable to realize industrial transformation and upgrading. Some clusters even begin to show the signs of recession. In order to change this situation and take full use of industrial cluster’s agglomeration effect and spill-over effect, it is necessary to promote inter-firm cooperation consciousness and quality within industrial clusters. and these are ensured by the high relationship quality of inter-firms within industrial clusters.Therefore researching on the factors influencing inter-firm relationship quality within industrial cluster has important significance to guide inter-firm cooperation in industrial cluster.In order to research the factors influencing inter-firm relationship quality within industrial clusters, this paper at first gives a brief introduction to the general theories of industrial cluster and relationship quality, and in view of the features to industrial clusters, this paper extend the research results of "enterprise-customer" relationship quality to "enterprise-enterprise" relationship quality.Then the research adopts the methods of questionnaire and involves eight traditional industrial clusters in Quanzhou City, Dongguang City, Wenzhou City and Qingdao City.The result shows that the main factors include the similarity of cooperative enterprises, partner’s marketing ability, past cooperation experience and entrepreneurial private relations,but the range and degree of effect is different. At last, the paper gives some advice to increase the inter-firm relationship quality within industrial clusters according to the result.The main innovation of this paper is that research the factors influencing inter-firm relationship quality from the perspective of industrial clusters, and research the factors influencing inter-firm relationship quality within industrial clusters by the method of empirical analysis.